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Special Expo Report: Part - 6: Finance & Other Apps
This is the second to the last Expo report and will focus on everything we saw that was cool and useful to digital AEC practice other than the Palm Computing platform, which we will cover in the last Expo report (look for that sometime later next week). Financial Application Notes MultiLedger and Payroll MultiLedger and Payroll by CheckMark Software Inc. were both left out of our Special Report: Financial Applications for Architects, part one and two, because we didn't know about them. I did quite a lot of talking to the CheckMark representative and he did quite a lot of listening and was particularly interested in what architects and AEC professionals would need out of a financial application. When I explained that while there were many excellent choices for accounting software on the Mac platform, there we few that addressed the time tracking, time budgeting and time billing aspects of practice. I explained that an ideal system would include a simple time tracking client application to be used by each staff architect, engineer, manager or designer that would serve as a digital timecard. This timecard application would then feed time data to an accounting application (like MultiLedger) over a network. [Ideally the accounting application would do this automatically on a schedule and return a message in the time card client application that notifies the staff member of errors and an incomplete timecard.] MultiLedger does NOT have time billing functions. However, the representative admitted that people keep asking about it and that they know it is a high priority for future versions of the application. We'll have to wait and see on this one. MultiLedger is TimeSlips Accounting Link (TAL)-enabled so that you can transfer payment and receivable information from TimeSlips directly into MultiLedger, saving you hours of manually inputting this data. MultiLedger is an integrated accounting solution for both Windows and Macintosh. The program features include Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory and General Ledger (pretty standard stuff - see other finance apps). Special features include multi-user use up to 10 users at one time with password protection by user and menu command. Fully cross-platform compatible -- company data works on mixed Macintosh/Windows environments. The program also requires little system resources. Works on any Macintosh with 1 MB or RAM, native PowerPC, System 7 thru. 8.6 compatible. The program also integrates with their Payroll for Macintosh.
Payroll is either a stand-alone application or used with MultiLedger -- post your payroll information directly into MultiLedger or export the data into other accounting packages. The complete payroll solution calculates net pay, Social Security, Medicare and federal, state, and local withholding taxes. It handles hourly or salaried pay rates and tracks regular, overtime, double-time, sick, and vacation hours. The program also supports user-defined deduction and income categories, creates checks, earnings and quarterly tax liability reports, and prints out W-2, W-3,941 and 1099 forms. Payroll also supports importing of time data from other programs such as spreadsheets and database programs. The representative said people use FileMaker Pro to track time and import that data into Payroll at pay time. I suggested a simple time card client application to go with Payroll for Macintosh would help time-based professionals right away. Accounting Today has called Payroll "elegant ... ideal" for small businesses. And Macworld has called the program "...the best of all Mac payroll programs." We felt like this company was very interested in supporting Macintosh and very willing to listen to customer input for future features. The printed manuals looked very good, easy to follow and thorough. You can get a free working demo disk for both of these programs.
Aatrix Top Pay Aatrix Top Pay is a payroll product which we did not cover in previous reports on financial applications for AEC. The product works with Intuit's QuickBooks and QuickBooks Pro for Macintosh accounting applications, products which are currently at version 4.0M12. Top Pay was chosen to serve payroll features with Y2K compliance using QuickBooks. Now when you purchase a new version of QuickBooks you get Top Pay with it for free. Top Pay is a little more advanced than Payroll by CheckMark Software. The program features include the ability to support electronic EFTPS payment of 940 and 941 liabilities, Pension Plan tracking, including company contributions, and Flex/Cafeteria Plan Handling. The program is much larger, requiring not only QuickBooks 4.0 but 5 MB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive (all of which is nothing by today's standards). Other features include Auto exporting of data to other software, custom check designer, and multi-state payroll processing. The TimeSlips Question? I asked Aatrix representatives about importing TimeSlips data into Aatrix Accounting (formerly it was PeachTree Accounting for Macintosh which is listed as being compatible with TimeSlips import). They didn't know the answer to that one. Both Aatrix Accounting and Aatrix Mac P&L do NOT include time billing, budgeting and tracking like QuickBooks Pro or M.Y.O.B applications. I asked them about time billing and they said the same thing as the CheckMark people, "yeah, a lot of people are asking for that". I suggested that they integrate time billing functionality into Aatrix Accounting rather than Mac P&L because that program was designed for newbies to accounting and was easier to learn and master. Many professionals who bill by time are simply NOT interested in learning advanced accounting applications simply to produce billing statements and project their costs or have the resources to pay somebody to do this for them. One of the reps agreed completely with me while an other disagreed and suggested Aatrix Mac P&L was better suited for that. I think Aatrix Accounting may be perfect for the small practice or sole-proprietor who bills by time. Why they don't think so is beyond me. Go figure. For more on Aatrix software click here. The Aatrix website, which is powerered by Mac OS X Server, by the way, features Sherlock plug-ins for searching the site plus an online tax calculator and other features useful to visitors.
FileMaker Notes FMSync for JFile FMSync for JFile is Macintosh software that allows you to take your FileMaker Pro databases with you on your Palm Computing handheld computer, with the press of a single button. You can also add data to the database in the field and have it automatically merged with your FileMaker database. Simply synching your Palm device with your desktop or laptop computer produces identical sets of info on each device. The program requires JFile 3/2f or later for the Palm OS plus Palm MacPac version 2.1. And of course FileMaker Pro 4.x or later. Limitations include layouts with no more than 20 fields with field names of 20 characters or less; no individual data exceeding 500 characters in length; 500 character limit for sum of all data in one record; and, no more than 5000 records total in the found set. It is not a multi-user database, so it must contain at least one layout that does not contain related fields or portals. I spoke directly to the developer (one guy shop) and asked what was next for this application. He said a Windows version has been requested but he is not sure he wants to do that himself. He is also interested in other programs for Palm. I asked about accessing FileMaker Pro databases over the Internet and the future ability to network the program to support server hosted FileMaker Pro databases for multi-users. He is considering many of those items. For Palm-equiped AEC professionals, now you take those project and office-based databases on the go, into the field and be more equiped then ever to provide and attain valuable information about your projects.
HomeBase Internet FileMaker Pro Database Hosting This company offers FileMaker Pro web hosting at an affordable cost, starting at $16.00 per month for existing sites. I took this to mean you can add one database account to an existing account either at HomeBase Internet or hosted elsewhere. Call 1-888-748-0668 for more details on this. If you have a website and no means to host a FileMaker Pro database at that web host, prefer not to host it yourself, or it cost you too much to host it elsewhere, check out this company. They may have the solution you have been looking for.
Expo Report Series
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